In 1993, Carol Gluck argued that Japan's “long postwar” was distinctive, and that Japanese people clung to the “postwar” to express contentment with the status quo of democracy, peace and prosperity. This chapter shows the analysis is not valid in the Heisei era. After the mid-1990s, Japan's political and cultural elites, faced with Japan's diplomatic and economic stagnation, began to criticize the idea of the “postwar” in order to disrupt the status quo. The general public of the 2010s, on the other hand, viewed territorial disputes, the presence of US military bases and memories of the war as reasons why the “postwar” era was still continuing,

Introduction

In January 1989, the Showa Emperor, Hirohito, died and the Heisei Emperor, Akihito, took the throne. Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year that the Cold War ended. In other words, the Heisei era (1989–2019) overlapped with the post-Cold War era. Furthermore, within Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party having been in power since 1955, lost power in 1993, and the so-called 1955 System that was the domestic manifestation of the Cold War in Japan, ended. Thereafter, a generation of politicians who had not experienced WWII ascended to the post of prime minister.

However, Japanese mass media and intellectuals continued to use the word “postwar” (sengo) even in the Heisei era and beyond. Every time an important event occurred, such as the earthquake in and around Kobe city in 1995, the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, the change in security policy in 2015, or the Covid-19 pandemic starting in 2020, the mass media described these as “the first time in the postwar [era]” or “the turning point of the postwar [era].” What remains uninvestigated, however, is how the Japanese people of the Heisei era actually perceived the “postwar.”

In this chapter I investigate this issue from three angles. First, I reconsider Carol Gluck's commentary on the postwar published in 1993 and then categorize possible definitions of postwar. Second, I explore debates among political and cultural elites over the postwar era following the Cold War. Third, I then scrutinize opinion polls conducted in the Heisei era in order to understand how the postwar era was perceived by the Japanese general public. Following this analysis, I reconsider whether Gluck's commentary is still valid today.